Hamilton Beach 6 Speed Electric Stand Mixer with Stainless Steel 3.5 Quart Bowl, Planetary Mixing, Tilt-Up Head (63326), 300W

Great for making breadI waited to write a review until I had used this mixer for several months. Six months of use later, making bread weekly, I give it a “thumbs up.” I purchased this, and use this, only to bake bread — french style baguettes. When I purchased it, it was unclear from prior reviews how well this worked for bread making. My usual recipe is for three baguettes, and it uses 510 grams of bread flour. This mixer has no problem with that amount. It could clearly do more, if I needed. It works great, and it takes me only about 10 minutes from “get it out of the cabinet and ready” to “dough done,” to make my bread. The rest is just dough rising time. I did not want a huge Kitchen-aid mixer, nor need one. This does the job, and seems like it will keep doing the job for many years. It is reasonably light in weight, easy to store in the cabinet, and easy to set up; it stays stable on the counter while in use. In summary, it is extremely easy to use. I like simple and easy.Some reviewers have had problems with the dough hook “corroding in the dishwasher.” I have not — but I never put it in the dishwasher. Be reasonable! It takes all of a minute to rinse the dough hook (and the bowl) in the sink, and then put the mixer, hook and bowl away for next week. The hook works well for making bread dough, and shows no corrosion, and no wear of any kind after six months of frequent use.Okay, it is not the counter-top display beauty that the Kitchen-aid mixer might be . But it works just fine for me, just making bread dough.Addendum: Four years later, after many weekly uses making bread and pasta, it still works perfectly. Highly recommendedAnother Addendum: I was asked for my baguette recipe. This one is really good. Here it is:For three 8 oz Baguettes: 550 gr. flour (King Arthur Bread Flour). 385 ml warm water (use a kitchen scale to measure flour and water); 1 TBS of salt. 1 TBS of yeast (SAF brand instant yeast — using this great yeast doe make a difference). 1/2 TBS or less of sugar (optional, it speeds the rise, but the dough rise will rise well without it, just take a few min longer or so).Put dry ingredients in mixer bowel and stir with mixer. Add warm water (water should be about 120 F, like warm bath water; use a finger or a thermometer if your finger does not work normally) , mix on speed setting 2 for about 5 minutes. Remove dough and place dough in an oiled bowel, turn it over so it is coated with oil on all sides. Cover with wrap and let rise for an hour or more, until over twice the original volume.Place risen dough onto an oiled counter top. Smash it down, and fold it over. Divide the dough into three equal portions. Take each portion and press it flat onto the oiled counter top, press it into a square or rectangular shape, about 6 by 8 inch in size. Roll the flattened square of dough up, like a a scroll. Pick the roll up, and work the roll (a big “dough dong”) out to about 12 inches — just squeeze and hang it in your hands to stretch it out. Place the elongated 12 inch or more dough roll, with the seam side down, l onto a baguette pan, or onto parchment paper. Do all the three pieces the same. Cover lightly with wrap, and let rise for an hour or more — it should rise to over 2 times the original size. Start pre-heating oven while the the dough baguettes rises.Place the dough baguettes into a well pre-heated oven at about 490 to 520 degree (depending on your oven and altitude). I use a pizza/bread stone, and put the bread on top of the stone. But any big baking sheet will work. Before placing in oven, spray the bread with a heavy mist of water. Spray more water into the hot oven as you place the bread in — this gives the steam to help the bread rise a bit in the oven without crusting immediately in the hot oven. (Traditional French ovens are steam injected.) After ten minutes, turn the oven down to 475. Cook about 25 min, until nice and browned.Every friend I have shared this recipe with loves the results — and they ask for the recipe after tasting my bread. Good luck. It takes about three tries to get the feel, and get it “just right.” It takes me 10 minutes to make the dough, from the time I pull out the mixer, to the time I put it away.After the baguettes have cooled a bit, I cut them in half and put them in a zip lock bag, and freeze them. When needed, they defrost in about 20 minutes; I then reheat them in the oven for ten minutes or so. Reheated, they taste like crispy baguettes fresh from the French oven!

Surprised! Completely exceeded my expectations.I am taking culinary classes for baking and I quickly realized that if I was going to actually learn anything, I needed to practice at home, and to do that, I needed a “planetary” mixer.In class our mixers range from industry grade KitchenAid to Volrath to Hobart — with the last two being the machines that do the the severe high yield cookie and bread dough jobs.This was an intro class, and we did a little of everything, but I was most interested in bread. Since I am very serious about learning to bake, I began to explore and price planetary stand mixers. Since I am on a strict budget and not absolutely positive that I would continue the class, my goal was to find an “entry level” stand mixer with the planetary mixing action.To be clear, planetary refers to the action of whatever mixer utensil is at work in the bowl. For instance, if you are using the paddle tool, the paddle will be spinning in the bowl much in the same way an egg beater spins, however, there is a second motion in which a separate gear orbits the bowl as the paddle spins — so, there is a double action with a planetary mixer.I bought this at $79, based on the reviews and I honestly felt that it would be fine for practice and that eventually if my passion for baking continued, I would just run this into the ground for the time being. I sort of took the attitude that if things didn’t work out, I wasn’t out a huge investment and if it broke, well, it WAS the cheapest mixer I could find…BUT. WOW!I am NOT a baker but a novice baking student and I can honestly tell you that I have been beating the heck out of this thing and I cannot kill it!At home I have made 14 dozen lean dough french rolls, 8 dozen enriched dough rolls, 7 Pear Frangipane Tarts and several cookie batches.Now I mainly want to talk about the bread since there is a lot of static on here about how this mixes bread dough and the reason I think that this little mixer needs some respect is because — as I practiced, I DIDN’T know what I was doing. I was kneading dough with the bread hook way too long and often at a higher speed.However, bread dough can be very forgiving in the oven and all came out fine — but the amazing thing is that I abused this mixer out of ignorance and it just kept going.The bread recipes each called for 18 oz. of flour with one (Lean French) using 100% Bread Flour the other (Enriched) with a 12/6 oz. split of bread and AP flour.Due to my inexperience and some experimenting. I sometimes kneaded the dough for up to an hour when only 10 or 15 minutes was needed. This made the mixer very warm and I could hear it labor on occasion, but even now it works as well as the day I took it out of the box. It is made of plastic with a metal bowl and suction cup feet. It isn’t any louder than the mixers at school. It has a 3.5 qt. stainless steel bowl which is a little small, so although it was good for me to practice, I will eventually upgrade to a higher capacity mixer. However, at 300 watts — which is a little low, power-wise — it never seemed to struggle as I assumed it would. It would start to labor a bit and then recover as if it shifted gears.This mixer turned out to be a pleasant surprise and even after I upgrade, I will be keeping this little guy around as both a back-up and a secondary mixer if I get on a roll. If you are a hardcore baker with intense high yield formulas, you should probablypass.

GreatIf you 1) can’t bear the thought of spending $400+ on the stand mixer everyone wants, 2) you’re not even sure how often you’d use a stand mixer, 3) you still want quality in case you use it regularly, then this is for you.The main reason I suddenly wanted a stand mixer is because I have to eat gluten free and all of the seemingly best recipes for gf breads and pizza crust required a stand mixer. I was tired of just ok pizza crust. I read a ton of reviews on this thing and I figured it was worth a try.I’m very pleased with it. It’s got good suction to keep it from moving on the counter while in use, the attachments are easy to put on and take off, bowl and attachments clean easily, and the settings are very straightforward.I have been using this about once a week for pizza and bread dough. It handles that thick stuff like a champ.I’d recommend to anyone who is more of an occasional or casual baker. If you are the kind of person who will want all the extra attachments and features, you probably need to keep looking.But if a whisk, flat beater, and dough hook are all you’ll need, choose this mixer.

Best bang for your buckI mainly bought this for bread and pizza dough and didn’t want to blow $300 on a kitchen aid because I just started baking and didn’t know how frequently I would be baking. I also kept reading KA classic reviews that they aren’t the best with bread and aren’t made as well the last couple of years. The KA pro with 500 W vs. 300 W probably blows both away and the reviews recommend that for bread if going with KA (there seem to be a couple other brands that are better if doing strictly bread), but I am not going to spend $300-$500 on a new hobby that I may stop within a month or two. This is great for someone that is starting out, doesn’t bake enough to justify the extra expense, or is buying this for a teenager that bakes, or someone that does not have the money for a KA but wants a reliable mixer.Since buying this in May I have made 1-2 1lbs loafs of bread weekly, a number of pizza dough batches, homemade pitas every couple weeks, muffins weekly, chocolate chip cookies, and even mixed ground beef with seasoning for beef jerky sticks. The bread will also come out much better than kneading by hand and it will save a lot of time mixing which I think is arguably true for most stand mixers because it will mix more in 5 minutes than you by hand in 10-20 minutes.More specifically, for bread, it starts to strain a bit on 1, so I start with that so flour doesn’t fly all over and then kick it up to 2 once the flour is mixed in with generally has no problem although it will sound like it bogs down here and there if it hits a dense patch. It will still power through 6 cup double batches and I have even done 8 cup pizza dough batches to make 4 large pizzas which starts to hit its limits. The KA classic reviews seem to say it is similar for bread or the plastic gear breaks so I figure I’d rather burn out an $80 mixer than a $300 classic if it burnt out quickly…. Again, the KA pro reviews seem to say that can power through dough much better, so if I continue to bake this much that may be my likely replacement down the line.Outside of bread/pizza dough it has had no issues with muffin and mixing ground beef (the batter attachment), and my sister has liked it for cakes and icing. Yes, you may have to scrape up some flour on the very bottom with batters once to ensure everything is mixed, but it is not worth $200-300 to me to avoid 15 seconds of manual mixing especially if I were only baking once a week or less. You just swirl a spoon around the bottom a couple times, turn the mixer on for 10-20 seconds and it is fully mixed. Last, I have personally not used the whisking attachment.In summary, is this the best mixer on the market? No, but for $80 it is a great option for an infrequent baker, someone just dabbling their feet into baking, or buying a mixer for a responsible teenager that bakes, or for someone that doesn’t have $300-500 to throw down on a mixer. Using cars as an analogy, this is not the BMW/Mercedes of mixers. This is the Honda Civic/Accord, Toyota Corolla, Ford Focus,… of mixers. It is not the flashiest, not the prettiest, not a status symbol, and not the most powerful on the market, but it will reliably take you where you need to go for a reasonable price.

A capable mixer, as good a KitchenAid for basic mixing dutyI don’t like to review things until we’ve owned them for a decent amount of time.  We purchased this mid 2019 as a gift that ended up being duplicated.  We already own a KitchenAid so I held on to it thinking it would make a good Christmas gift, but got curious a few weeks later and opened it up.    The KitchenAid is a fantastic beast of a stand mixer, but after using this, I tell people that if you need a KitchenAid, you already know it, and if you don’t know that you need one, I’d purchase one of these.First off all, it’s smaller, easier to store, and a bit quieter, probably due to being smaller.  It has the same mixing motion/action of a KitchenAid.  It costs less.It has easily handled the stickiest of batters and the stiffest of doughs without breaking a sweat. Compared to a KitchenAid, the bowl is more tall/narrow, which means you have to stop the mixer and tilt up the head to scrape down the sides of the bowl, but this is only mildly annoying   The paddle mixer for the KitchenAid is metal while this one is plastic, but so far, this hasn’t presented any problems.  Likewise, the KitchenAid dough hook seems more substantial, but again, I’ve had no trouble making dough in the Hamilton Beach.  It also doesn’t support attachments.So that has become the differentiator for me – if I just need to mix something,  90% of the time, I’m getting out the Hamilton Beach mixer and not the KitchenAid.  For basic mixing duty, the KitchenAid offers no advantages that I can see.   If I need to grind meat or use the spiralizer attachment, I’ll pull out the KitchenAid.  If I want to make pasta, I prefer the Hamilton Beach and a Marcato Atlas 150. The reason I compare it to KitchenAid is because that seems to be the standard people compare stand mixers to, but If you’re just mixing cakes, cookies, bread, etc, give this model a serious look, it’s been great so far.